Can Your ATM Play Beethoven? 657
bpiltz writes "A funk band in Harrisonburg, VA, called Midnight Spaghetti, has posted a story with photos about a newly installed Diebold Opteva 520 ATM at Carnegie Mellon University that crashed, then rebooted. The Windows XP operating system initialized without the actual ATM software. The result was a public desktop computer, with only a touch screen interface, left wide open for the amusement of the students at the most wired university in the U.S. Interestingly, Diebold is one of the leading manufacturers of e-voting machines."
"Progress"? (Score:5, Insightful)
seem to be getting slower and slower to use. 10 years back, you'd insert your
card, be able to key in your pin number straight away and be straight into the
menu. Now, you insert the card, stand about while it thinks about checking it,
then you eventually enter a pin and wait around a bit more before using the
sluggish interface. Now I know that these machines have media player, web browser and
all sorts of other redundant crap installed on a full version of XP, I understand the
reason the queues are growing!
I don't need 24 million colours, animations and other crap just to take money out
of my account, dammit! It's staggering to think that the software has become so
bloated and slow that machines produced 10 years ago, with only a fraction of the
computing power of today were actually far more responsive to use.
I remember seeing an ATM reboot a few years back (brief power outage). It briefly
showed the OS2 logo before resuming normal operation
Re:"Progress"? (Score:5, Interesting)
After a brief five-year stint in North-Dakota, where time stood still in happy-land, I ended up in Dublin. I read an article about how Windows had made its way into the ATM-business, thinking "uh-oh-mf-cs-sob"...given my past experiences with this OS-king-of-userfriendliness.
Yesterday, I put my Norwegian super-VISA-bank-card into an Ulster Bank ATM and it stole it! It just swallowed the card, proceeding to say something like: "System down, please use another cashpoint."
So, I call Norway, to ensure there isn't a problem with the actual card. It takes me quite a bit of time before I actually managed to call Ulster bank's customer service line. When I get through, I explain the situation (I had to rephrase 'the ATM stole my card' into 'swallowed it' before I could be assisted).
So the customer service rep states that he can't help me. I ask if there's anyone with any authority that can help me get the card back (it takes me a while to get a new one from Norway). He says: "Sorry, Sir. The ATM in question not being directly attached physically to a bank, a contractor does that job for us. Your card will be destroyed when the ATM is serviced."
I state something to the extent of Ulster bank being poorly organized. The little turd on the other end of the line proceeds to tell me: "I'm sorry, but we took the network down for a few minutes. You must have inserted the card just at that moment."
If I find out this particular ATM is Windows-operated, I will hunt down Mr. Gates, roll him in tar and feathers and chase him out of town with a stick. In the meantime I will file a complaint with Ulster Bank for taking away my sole source of cash until next pay-day.
For once... (Score:5, Insightful)
I'd rather find the execs of the bank, and roll them in tar and feathers and chase them out of town with a stick. Any one can make an offer... I can offer to run their ATM network on Linux 2.6.4-alpha1-test4-pre2 too. If they're willing to buy it, that's their stupidity, not mine.
Kjella
Re:"Progress"? (Score:5, Interesting)
The hardest thing in the world is returning an ATM / Credit card. I found one next to a machine from an Alaskian credit union, and I being in washington. I thought to my self, "Hey, I will do the honest thing and try to get this card back to the owner".
Well, the 800 number on the back was unwilling to co-operate... they told me to cut up the card. This was on a saturday and may have not been offical bank help. So I tracked down the bank in Alaska, or near as I could find too it, and tried to talk to them about the issue basicly, "I have this card, i'd like to return it to the owner".
They refused to do the following
1. Provide me with any contact information as to where to send the card too (totally understand)
2. Take down my contact information so in the event the owner called to get a new one, they could say just use the old one, this guy will give it to you.
3. To actually take back the fucking card so they could return it to the owner in a timely fasion.
In the end, after getting frustrated trying to do the right thing, I used it to apply puddy to my automobile, and it probally is still encased in a lump of pudddy.
The point is, banks will assume the worst when it comes to you no longer physicaly having your card. They are not equiped to handle an honest person who actually didn't charge up anything on the card dispite the fact they could verify this fact who's trying to return the card. They will try to convience you they are doing you a favor when in reality they would rather let someone else do the paperwork, which always falls on the person giving you a new damn card.
RE: Mr. Naive (Score:5, Informative)
As they should! (Score:5, Insightful)
> comes to you no longer physicaly having your card.
As they should. Really, it is much simpler for the bank to just issue a replacement card than to bother returning the old one. Think about it: should they print a piece of embossed plastic that costs a few cents, or have the kindhearted finder send the old card in (37 cents) and remail it to the owner (another 37 cents + 15 minutes of somebody's time [or more, if Windows crashes]) all the while ensuring that no fraudulent transactions take place in the meantime (priceless)?
Re:As they should! (Score:4, Interesting)
I treated the guy and his family to a steak dinner at a local steakhouse to show my gratitude. I've rambled on forever, but the moral of the story is that honesty should be encouraged and rewarded.
Re:"Progress"? (Score:5, Funny)
Even better, let's say you doused a $20 bill in poison and deposited it in the bank. You know, they don't burn all the cash that's deposited, they reuse it and hand it back out, without even cleaning it first (due to short-sighted laws against laundering money). Shocking, isn't it?
And I daresay paper currency will absorb your poison better than plastic credit card, too. Where it will mix with the cocaine residue, the gasoline contamination from people who've just filled their car, and the bacteria from people who didn't wash their hands after scratching that hemorrhoid itch, forming a lethal brew.
Your best bet for survival is to only accept coins, and to carry a blowtorch to sterilize them with before handling them.
Re:"Progress"? (Score:3, Informative)
Even though your card most likely has instructions to return it to the issuer if found.
I state something to the extent of Ulster bank being
Re:"Progress"? (Score:5, Interesting)
I just received my new card and had memorised the PIN number, and went to withdraw money. Three times I tried to enter my PIN and the amount of money I want to withdraw. Each time the machine refused to accept the transaction. After the third time, the machine swallowed my card, telling me to contact the bank. So I call them up, and am told "our machine automatically shreds any card after three unsuccessful attempts and sends an electronic notification to your bank", we can't do anything. So I call up my bank, and they tell me I can't get a new card until they written notification from the machine owners. Neither would talk to the other. In the end, I had to pretend that I had lost my card in order to get a replacement.
It seems to me to be more of dodgy protocol implementations rather than anything else.
Re:"Progress"? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:"Progress"? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:"Progress"? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:"Progress"? (Score:5, Interesting)
``Alright, lets go to the bar.''
``Sure, but first I need to go to the bank on high street.''
``Why? That one is two block in the opposite direction, there's a bank the way we are going that's on the same system so it won't charge you any fees.''
``I know, but that one has one of those old black-and-green displays. You can't trust something like that. The other bank has an ATM with color and animation.''
It really upsets me to know that things like that actually matter to people.
-Colin [colingregorypalmer.net]
Re:"Progress"? (Score:4, Informative)
Actually, you would be surprised to know you aren't that far off. I worked IT for a Credit Union a couple of years ago, and the new "wave" was to automatically compare your credit score with what you already had, etc, so we could target things. Basically, you could log onto the home banking, and be presented with a screen that says that you have already been approved for a 10k car loan, simply click to accept it.
Now with most people using Check Cards or Credit Cards from the same instituition it wouldn't shock me in the least to think about them aggregating and categorizing your expenses to target deals to you.
Re:"Progress"? (Score:5, Informative)
Indeed. In the 1980s, Clydesdale Bank (in Scotland) actually used to feature the speed of their cash dispensers (a.k.a. ATMs) in their advertising, claiming that you could get money out of theirs faster than their competitors' machines. I don't recall any bank making claims like that for a long time.
Also, it's not just cash dispensers that are slow: railway ticket machines and car park payment machines are just two of the types of kit that I bemoan the speed of every time I use them. You can tell that they've been programmed in a very serial fashion, with no attempt to optimise the speed of the transaction for the user. Most machines could be programmed to pre-load blanks into printers, or pre-print static header information on receipts, or otherwise get started on time-consuming tasks, but they never seem to. You can practially follow the progress of the transaction through the machine's guts as it plods away at it.
And the receipt printers on point-of-sale equipment always seem to have the slowest possible mechanisms, making shop assistants who care feel that they have to apologise for keeping the customer waiting. (I bet if the banks could have used the old ZX80 scorched-black-on-silver-paper printer mechanism and saved a buck, they would have.)
Re:"Progress"? (Score:4, Interesting)
F*cking railway ticket printers are one of my "buttons". You turn up with 20 minutes to spare for your train, join a huge queue, vying for the attention of 2 ticket clerks working in a mostly empty 12 booth office (at the busiest time of the morning, you'd think they'd have the most staff on, but nope). You reach the desk with 2 minutes to spare and ask for your return tickets for the week (to save having to queue the other 4 days). The clerk then has to enter the exact same information 5 times?! I have asked about this before and apparently "that's how it works". After this typing marathon, the ticket printer grinds into life, spitting out a ticket every 5 seconds or so with a "kerchunk" noise, by which time your train has left, then... I think I'll just leave this subject now; I'm getting angry just thinking about it...
As an aside, I've been cleaning up some of the cruft old shell scripts and stuff on our commercial systems where I work. We've always had a problem with the slow printing on label printers in our warehouse loading bays (every box loaded onto a truck has a sticker attached). A lot of the time, several hundred (or thousands) of these stickers could be identical. Looking at the script used to format the data and send it to a printer, I noticed that for each label to be printed (a single file would hold thousands of lines of data - one per label), the script would query the Oracle database for additional data, parse the response through AWK, and send the result to the printer. The printer would print this, then the whole process would start again for line 2, and so on until the input file had no more lines.
The upshot of this was a very obvious increase in load on our Oracle server, which is already busy, when the loading bays were working (remember there's one printer per bay, and they are all doing this). The labels (even if all were identical) would come out at a rate of one every 3-4 seconds on a good day, which was clearly unacceptable.
I altered the script to group identical lines and send an additional parameter to the printer to repeat the last job x times. Funnily enough, a run of 1000 identical labels now takes around 10 seconds with next to no server load
Re:"Progress"? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:"Progress"? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:"Progress"? (Score:3, Insightful)
By adding all that extra code, you make snafu's like this possible, and you get nothing in return.
Re:"Progress"? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:"Progress"? (Score:3, Insightful)
It is for the banks. Your needs don't matter; you're just a sheep to fleeced.
Better solution? (Score:3, Interesting)
BTW, I'm not totally averse to Arc's etc, I have a 4000 series here somewhere that I hacked a NIC into and managed to get on the internet (how proud of myself was I?)
Re:"Progress"? (Score:5, Insightful)
Platform? One of the nice things about vintage cash machines was the fact that the software was written in assembly. Let's face it, all a bank machine is is just a glorified terminal. It has no need to store information, no need to access disks, mount devices, nor access a network outside of it's banking protocal. There is no need for it to accept new software other then perhaps firmware update from time to time, nor the ability to run background processes. Doesn't need to do cron events or anything above and beyond take card, peform action on account, say thank you.
Re:"Progress"? (Score:5, Insightful)
True, except that modern ATMs will have biometrics (finger scanners and whatnot), plus that printer thingy that gives your receipt, then there's the monitor, maybe some sort of check scanner for inputting money, a dispenser for giving cash, and viola, you have attached devices which need drivers.
Re:"Progress"? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:"Progress"? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:"Progress"? (Score:4, Interesting)
Why did they switch from their cheap, stable, predecessors? Targeted, full-featured advertisements. M$ gave them a deal on the embedded version of their crap OS so the (up-front) cost of the OS wasnt that big of a deal. The project cost as a whole, however, was considerable. At some point someone is going to have to do an ROI analyses to see if it was worth it. As users get charged to go to other ATMs and charged to go to the human teller they are "incented" to use the ATMs no matter how bad they suck or how long they have to wait for them to be repaired. I personally dont bank with who I work for and am happy to pay the fees to any bank that has ATMs that are quick and easy to use, but I am a minority use-case.
Re:"Progress"? (Score:4, Informative)
I'll agree the modern ATM will have all these things... but just because you have devices doesn't mean you need drivers in a the modular sense. There was a time when we hardcoded applications to specific devices, like printers and scanners for example.
1. finger scanners
This is true, but it's not like the ATM it self actually stores the database of account numbers vs fingerscanner... I would imagine that this is stored in your bank records. Get scan, send data to bank... if scan = record permit transation
2. printer thingy that gives your receipt
I believe that your typical cash machine printer only prints in one font, on terminal paper. There are others who use impact, but this isn't a complex operation
3. there's the monitor
I'm rather old school in my attitde tward display, I still think a bank terminal display being a glorified typewriter
4. check scanner for inputting money
I believe you are talking about OCR... Magnetic ink bank account numbers are easy enough to read.. human print is slightly harder. I'll have to do some research and see what sorta system the post office does to peform OCR on hand printed postal codes. But again... this logic doesn't even have to happen at the cach machine. Scanner that gets triggered and send a bitmap to the bank in question, relays back to the bank the amount it read.
5. dispenser for giving cash
Again, not a complex operation. communicate to the dispencer which bill to spit out of the machine
---
All but biometrics and check scanners were operations the vintage cash machine peformed, without a standardized platform. Keep in mind that the actual verification process will still be peformed by the bank it self. I will continue to think of cash machines as glorified terminals. They gather data and communicate it to a remote location, remote location sends back information, and it displays, prints, and sometimes spews or accepts money.
Re:"Progress"? (Score:5, Informative)
being swallowed isn't nearly as bad as the money just not coming out!
i was using a ATM at the FORUM mall in Helsinki, Finland. I told it i wanted 60 euros. upon entering my request, the screen displayed the error, "UNABLE TO COMPLETE TRANSACTION" and gave me my card back and a receipt with the same error message.
no big deal, right? a few days later, i see that 60 euros was removed from my account from that exact cash machine on the exact date i was there! i contact my bank in California and they tell me that i need to contact the bank that owns the machine.
i then walk into the responsible bank in Helsinki, and they swear up and down they never removed the 60 euros, regardless of showing them the receipt and everything. further, they then tell me that MY bank was in error and that i should speak with them.
after several hours of going bank and forth, i finally say to hell with it, it's not worth the time and frustration.
this is the only time it has ever happened to me, but i am interested in hearing other similar stories from folks around the world.
what countries have you had problems in?
Re:"Progress"? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:"Progress"? slightly OT (Score:4, Funny)
Re:"Progress"? (Score:4, Informative)
I find that the best thing to do is only go to your bank's ATM -- and not the mini portable ATMs, but the ones embedded in the wall of the bank where you have to insert your card (not swipe, which could be intercepted by an intermediary swiper). Then when you get your cash, be sure to count it in front of the camera. I've had less money come out once but because I counted it in front of the camera, it was all right and I got my money.
Bank Error In Your Favor (Score:4, Interesting)
It boggles the mind how bankers could be so indifferent to their money going missing like that. As a programmer, I know that ANY (memory / money) leak of whatever size is trouble on the wing and must be tracked to its source, and it ought to be a matter of course for bankers to think likewise. Competent, honest ones, anyway...
Re:"Progress"? (Score:5, Interesting)
You sure you didn't get your money back automatically after like 3-5 days? Because these things happen every now and then, ie the ATM fails because some local problem (software or mechanical), you don't get the money, and later you see that the amout has disappeared from your account.
But in (almost) every case, the money is not actually withdrawn, only "reserved" (that's what the banks call it) for a number of days, after which they are "unreserved" and show up on your account again.
I had a similar experience with an ATM in Romania once, the ATM software completed the transaction and then crashed before it handed out the money. Later that evening I connected to my bank account from an internet cafe, and of course - that money had disappeared from the account. I called my bank in sweden to report it, but they just told me that the money was not withdrawn, only reserved, and that it would be back on my account in a few days - which it was, to my relief.
Generally, banking systems (including ATMs and card payment terminals) have good failsafe machanisms that aborts the transaction if it encounters a problem in any little detail along the way.
Re:"Progress"? (Score:5, Interesting)
The only place Windows is allowed is on the desktop, and that is still NT4 hidden behind a Solaris based proxy and firewalled to the hilt. You cannot even go OUT on a port other than 80 or 443, nevermind the other way.
I work as a contractor and run my own company, so am not affiliated with RBS in any way...
That idea... (Score:3, Interesting)
Seriously, though, that wouldn't be cost-efficient. What's the point of including enough storage on every card to hold a kernel when you can still only use that card at an ATM? IMO, a credit card is more like a USB key than anything else: It's just a means of authentication used in accessing the ATM system.
Re:ATMs (Score:4, Funny)
"ATM Machine".
But of course...
Where else would you use your PIN Number...
Clippy! (Score:5, Funny)
I see you're trying to extract free cash from a bolloxored ATM cum jukebox. May I help you?
minesweeper... (Score:5, Funny)
Obligatory play on words (Score:5, Funny)
And this surprises you (Score:4, Funny)
A) It's based off of Windows
B) It was made by Diebold.
Adding A + B != C where C equals something that works correctly.
Election Day... (Score:4, Funny)
Bush 15%
Kerry 15%
Nader 70%
Jim set's all Bush and Kerry votes to go to Nader.
Jim runs the voting system front end. Sets it to full screen.
Jim leaves.
Nader wins
Re:Election Day... (Score:5, Insightful)
Fraud can still occur. It's just that those conducting the fraud have to be extremely careful to avoid detection: only chaning a few dozen votes in areas where the vote is close to begin with, and so on. They always have to stay within statistical margins of error.
ACTUALLY THIS HAPPENED!!!! see democracy now (Score:3, Interesting)
ALL Diebold machines in florida booted BY DEFAULT to the windows screen not to the voting system software. You have to hold F10 to force them to boot in kiosk mode. Thus You could get back to the windows screen simply by forcing a reboot, no special passwords needed.
To top it off the central database that is used is not protected by an obligatory password. That is the data base has
I just don't know whether to laugh or cry! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:I just don't know whether to laugh or cry! (Score:5, Insightful)
People are lazy, and costs have to be kept down. What's usually important in a company, is to make their business process "lean and mean", not their software or PCs.
Re:I just don't know whether to laugh or cry! (Score:4, Insightful)
The old ones work.
Re:I just don't know whether to laugh or cry! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Moderators: +5 Insightful!!! (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:I just don't know whether to laugh or cry! (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:I just don't know whether to laugh or cry! (Score:3, Insightful)
"One's?" What the fuck is wrong with me!
I thought I knew the difference between plural and possessive.
Change you cannot avoid (Score:3, Interesting)
But you are on to something. Can we invent something that is the opposite of Moore's law? Something like: "Software will become nn% harder to write every two years due to ste
Economics, that's why (Score:5, Insightful)
An 8080 computer set up in a config with USB ports, serial, parallel, video, etc etc will probably run you something close to $3,000 US, and spares will be difficult as they'll have to be single supplier.
Also, the drivers for things like printers and card readers are only going to be available for Windows (and increasingly Linux), so if you have an embedded device, the integration costs are going to be high.
On the other hand, you can get a robust PC from a major manufacturer for something under $1,000 US and it can be replaced by any manufacturer. There are drivers for everything, and software development will be cheaper because windows programmers are more available than embedded programmers.
Re:I just don't know whether to laugh or cry! (Score:5, Insightful)
Once you replace the person with a machine, you lose the revenue stream generated by the "cold selling" tactics. So, as technology advances and the machines can handle more tasks, why not? If a company is paying to own or lease IT 24 hours a day, that IT should be earning you money 24 hours a day. Just spitting out greenbacks without advertising more products is just not taking full advantage of the technology. Business doesn't care that that's all YOU want out of the machine.
ATM OS diversity (Score:5, Interesting)
I got a chance to talk to one of my bank's IT people about this a few months ago, and basically, they don't know what's causing the crashes because analyzing the log files would just be too much trouble. So their SOP is to have some guy with a key come out, literally pull the plug on the machine and wait till it reboots.
He also told me that they were slowly migrating over to a "custom XP version", whatever that's supposed to mean. I probably should have told him that Windows machines can be prone to virus infections [windowsfordevices.com] (cough cought [securityfocus.com]).
Re:ATM OS diversity (Score:5, Informative)
Funny side note though, on all our ATMs, the terminal driver (computer) has its own display on the backside of the unit along with a mouse and keyboard. Of course, we arent using the graphics capabilities because our terminal processor is hmm...slightly older than time.
So useful facts to be noted from experience:
1) Diebold techs do not know their rectums from a serial card. (Ive had to carefully hold their hands through IP setup and assigning the correct host:port combo to attach to the terminal processor)
2) Ive never seen an OS2 atm crash, nor have I ever seen it fail to boot the TCS (Terminal control software).
3) Windows driven ATMs have to the stupidist idea ive ever heard of, but cant really use linux...(see point one about said sub-sentient techs.)
4) I fear a world with diebold designed and serviced windows based voting devices. the havoc...the horror....
Re:ATM OS diversity (Score:5, Interesting)
The Diebold tech came out, I let him into the ATM room, gave him the IP, gateway, and the host IP and port... and he had the system converted in no time flat. Unfortunately, the problem was NOT with Diebold.
Once he had the system up and online, we had to get the software with the screens the public sees downloaded to the ATM. We spent about 5 hours on the phone off and on with a programmer from our processor and with a programmer from Diebold. They argued back and forth about whose fault it was, and finally the guy from Diebold convined them to email him the load they were sending us and the load from a working bank so he could compare. The next day I come in to work, the Diebold tech shows up about 20 minutes later (10 minutes earlier than he had told me he would)... and he immediately starts telling me what's going on. Apparently our processor is sending us an imcomplete load for some reason, less than half the size it should be. All that arguing yesterday, and they never actually took the time to check that they were sending us the right thing.
So we have to sit and wait for them to get into THEIR offices and send the correct and working load to our ATM. When they finally do, the Diebold guy finishes up the install by loading the admin card onto the HD, showing the CSR that will handle it how to balance both from the front of the ATM and from the rear screen, and he was done.
I lay absolutely NONE of the blame on Diebold for the incident. He even said that he wouldn't bill us for the hours that he sat around waiting on someone at the processor to fix the problem. Other than a few frame relay outages (not Diebold's fault) and this little conversion incident (again not Diebold's fault)... this ATM has been rock solid. Unfortunately, we can't get one like that anymore, so the ATM going into our new branch is going to be an Opteva running Windows TCS+.
Long story short, Diebold is a large company that sells everything; the cabinets, the actual vault and vault door, our security system and cameras, the ATM, and even the modular frame for the teller line. To dismiss the whole company because of issues that they have with e-voting is unfair and unfortunate. Yeah, I'm the IT guy.... but I've also helped oversee every aspect of both of our new branches, and have yet to find a complaint about Diebold.
Buffer overflow code on swipe card .. (Score:4, Interesting)
a swipe card so that the software reading the card
suffered some kind of buffer overrun ? (Depending
of course on how carefuly the software checked for
them).
Re:Buffer overflow code on swipe card .. (Score:5, Informative)
Win XP ? (Score:3, Interesting)
Aren't there any regulations about cash machine security ?
Re:Win XP ? (Score:4, Informative)
Their have however been attempts to introduce legislation pertaining to ATM safety in general, both on the federal [theorator.com] and on the state level (the only example that I'm personally familiar with being NY (see here [state.ny.us] and here [state.ny.us]) .
Dupe.... (Score:4, Informative)
Here's the link. [slashdot.org]
It's good to look at comments, and submit stories. It gets you karma. Also, it's good to look around that comment, and then post comments in this story. That would gain karma too
Posting a comment about the comment on which the current
Not that unusual (Score:5, Interesting)
They should have used the "On-Screen Keyboard" under Accessibility. It is a little scary that this was connected to cash.
If you want a good read for the database schemas an ATM uses, read "Principles of Transaction Processing." One interesting bit of knowledge is that the entire table of valid account names and their card hashes is replicated to each ATM! (Obviously for your bank only.) It sends out a ping that records "Joe took $50" to the main bank but it's only sort of a summary, the "full details" is kept at the ATM and sync'd at night.
One crazy thing that happened to me was I tried to withdraw $1100 from Bank A at Bank B's ATM. I got into a "Distributed Transaction Rollback" -- it got all the way through, printed out out my receipt that said I got the money, and -- never gave me my money. When I checked at a Bank A ATM, it showed the "hit" on my account. In about 15 minutes the Transaction Processor rolled back the transaction.
Re:Not that unusual (Score:3, Informative)
The reason they lowered the limit was card theft.
Insecurity and Paranoia (Score:4, Interesting)
ATMs not connected to the Internet and without keyboard are pretty much unhackable unless you can pry open the case and attach a keyboard and/or wireless connection. And if you could do that, I suspect pretty much any ATM would be hackable. There is a reason why ATMs are built from heavy steel and anchored in concrete.
Diebold systems raise paranoiac hackles for another reason: control and oversight. You don't need to invoke security flaws and Windows XP to realize that ballot boxes represent power and money. Whoever controls the counting process controls billions, trillions of $, and this is a temptation that few, if any, people can resist.
The argument against paperless touch-screen voting systems comes from the fact that such systems open the way to serious internal fraud, rather than hacking through any hardware or software weakness. Election fraud is done by incumbent politicians, not by hackers exploiting BSoDs.
The nightmare scenario for future US elections is where after a largely electronic and unverifiable poll, the governing party gets 55% of the vote despite exit polls showing that it got 45%. What would happen after such an event is anyone's guess, but it would not be pleasant.
WRONG! (Score:3, Informative)
If you read the article you would find out that they managed to input text - but with charmap instead of a keyboard.. So having no keyboard is no insurance that noone will be able to input character data.
Re:WRONG! (Score:3, Interesting)
You would need a lot better control than that to hack a machine in realtime. And if it's not in realtime, then the machine must have a network connection, or be able to save state in some way. ATMs seem designed without either of these, and so I'd regard them as "pretty unhackable" in the traditional sense. At
Re:WRONG! (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Insecurity and Paranoia (Score:3, Insightful)
Cut and past it really does work although a bit slow. say you use the integrated web browser and you can get a hand on most if not all the characters you need. Plus there is the character picker. but you probably have enough letters to choose from cutting and pasting to give you access to install a virtual keyboard or something. Now someone has access to a computer that dispenses money. I don't know about you but that seems like a security risk to me. Heck install a spy-w
Re:Insecurity and Paranoia (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Insecurity and Paranoia (Score:4, Interesting)
Can we please start saying "not having an audit trail" rather than a paper trail? While paper is nice and comfortable, it's not exactly reliable, and definitely not easy to back up. While many people say "oh, no, you don't want copies of the election results", in my opinion, considering most counties' election rules don't even allow for revoting, I think the foundation of our kind of government being taken out by a fire at one location, or a flood, is really quite silly. One can definitely imagine some sort of write once, read many medium which is used to store the results. Have the format be open, and the circuitry for the reader be available, and you're fine. You could even make the results available after the election to the public quite easily.
(Note that the argument "need to have something that even Aunt Martha can understand" doesn't hold water with me. Not everyone knows how to read. No matter what, you will cut out a significant fraction of the population by imposing any skill - the problem is not to have everyone be able to see the results, just to have a large enough fraction of the populace able to see the results. How many people could identify a forged paper trail anyway?)
Not having a cryptograpphicly/tamper resistand sound way of ensuring the right software is running
Yah, of course, the correct answer is to not have software running in the first place. Just do it on bare metal, and then no one would worry, because there would be no people like us saying "this isn't safe". Sigh. Why they're using Windows XP Embedded terminals for something that can be done with maybe 4 quad flip flops, I will never understand.
Ditto with the ATMs, as well. Do it on bare metal. Then when you want to improve it, improve the base design, don't reimplement it again. Full-blown computers are for the sloppy.
DIEBOLD Election Machine (Score:3, Funny)
Welcome to the 2004 Presidential Elections
Brought to you by DIEBOLD
Please select your new president:
George W. Bush [x] (recomended)
John Kerry [ ]
Ralph Nader [ ]
Submit [mithuro.com] Reset [mithuro.com]
If you are an official, and if you would like to adjust the vote manually, click here [mithuro.com]
And the last two options (Score:3, Funny)
Video of the ATM in action (Score:4, Informative)
Video with audio of ATM in action
Boy, times sure change (Score:3, Interesting)
>Finally, an annoyed faculty member in an adjacent office unplugged the machine and dispersed the crowd.
I remember back in the day, when faculty in a technical university would stop two wars before breakfast, and still have time to help with a hack before the toast popped.
Kind of sad to see the spirit of exploration being so ruthlessly crushed. Attention US Educators: creativity and free thinking is our only advantage over India and China. Ponder on who's going to be paying for your Medicare before you decide to quell your inquisitive students.
Pictures of something similar (Score:5, Interesting)
Take a look here [unworkable.org]
Imagine a Beo... (Score:5, Informative)
Imagine if that CDR drive was usable to load programs onto it. Furthermore, I'm really hoping these things don't have bluetooth in them.
520 Spec PDF [diebold.com]
-Steve
Re:Imagine a Beo... (Score:3, Interesting)
Can my Atm play Beethoven? (Score:3, Informative)
but I hear it can play metallica and pong.
Comment removed (Score:5, Funny)
Same in airport (Score:4, Funny)
What really scares me! (Score:4, Interesting)
Character map? (Score:3, Insightful)
Ahem, is the money dispenser connected via serial? (Score:3, Interesting)
Stupid Student's or maybe.. (Score:5, Insightful)
too honest
they had a machine that would give them money and all they did was use media player ? Diebold got off lightly!.
they [evil student] could of written a keylogger/pin reader/card cloner/data capture using the on-board vbscript/wscript language, (full access to filesystem and shell), build in a network check so as soon as the machine detects a network connection (as the students said it wasnt connected to anything presume at some point it will be connected to a network by an engineer or repairman) it trys to post the captured data to some.random.location.com, install it as a system service so it runs automatically in the background , even schedule it to run at specific times and you have one totally compromised machine
would of taken an hour max of programming time, maybe 15min if all you had to do was type it in and not compose it.
scary that not only is the software Windows but it has its own built in programming enviroment with access to every program on that machine including network access, and the only tool you need is notepad.
Re:Stupid Student's or maybe.. (Score:5, Informative)
The reason why I'm sure we didn't empty the machine of all its cash (asside from that whole breaking the law thing), is that there was no way to access the money-dispensing mechanism from the controls we had access to (read: only from the touchscreen)
The numberpad was totally useless, as windows didn't recognize it, and the character map is pretty slow for trying to actually do anything useful..
But we had a ton of fun with it anyway.
Windows XP Embedded (Score:5, Insightful)
It's a componentized version of Windows XP with a set of tools to customize it, remove any unnecessary components and prepare system images. It also has tricks like running from read-only media and intercepting message boxes that end users should not see.
It's even cheaper (for a moderate number of licenses).
Re:Windows XP Embedded (Score:3, Informative)
No, that's the wrong answer. In a well-designed ATM, there should not be any message boxes that users shouldn't see. If any unexpected error happens, the ATM code should immediately say "Sorry, I could not complete your transaction, please try later" and return the card. Having an error orccur and be hidden from the user is very much the wrong answer.
similar story: in-flight entertainment system (Score:5, Funny)
I got to the desktop for about 5 seconds before their entertainment app autostarted again. I then spent a fun hour or two re-crashing the blasted thing and trying to defeat the autostart. Never managed it though - that's the only time I recall that I wished I knew more about Windows.
Eventually I had to stop because it turned out that poor old Pentium wasn't my in-seat client but actually the server for the entire cabin, and a lynch mob was starting to form... 8-O
Re:similar story: in-flight entertainment system (Score:5, Funny)
Pilot: "The flight control app is not responding! Quick, try to kill it!"
Copilot: "The mouse is frozen... must... use... three-fingered salute..."
Pilot: "Still no response... okay, I'm gonna power-cycle the bastard."
Plane: (plummets 20'000 ft while they wait out the boot sequence)
Computer: All Your Boot Are Belong To Us.
Pilots: "Somebody has sent us up the virus! Aiiieeeee!"
Plane: *crash*
What's that? You want movies? (Score:5, Interesting)
Anyway, some people on misc.market also posted some movies [cmu.edu] that you might find interesting.
I go to CMU... (Score:5, Interesting)
The one on this article was funny and everything until that night when I remembered that I have my life savings in National City.
I stopped at some competing banks in the area on Thursday to get some pamphlets and I will be switching banks on Monday.
probably a dumb question about atm and cents (Score:5, Interesting)
1-5-0-0
to let the machine know I want 15 dollars instead of 15 cents. No atm that I've seen (granted, limited experience) will dispense change. I don't think I've seen any that even dispense dollar bills, so getting $17 is impossible. So why the decimals?
There are some that can! (Score:5, Informative)
It didn't ever seem to be filled up, but at least one ATM has been designed that could dispense change! I used to withdraw $19, just because I could put the 4 $1 and the $5 into the change machine for the washer and dryers.
The machine also could accept deposited checks WITHOUT AN ENVELOPE. It would scan the front of the check, show you an image and ask you if the scan was valid. If you deposited a check this way, it got into your account a full day faster than if it was in an envelope. I think it must have OCRed the text, as well as read the magnetic information from the bottom. Plus I imagine the workflow for the ATM operator was speedier. Of course, this all ran under OS/2 1.3, as I confirmed later.
Ahh, Pittsburgh, land of the oddball ATMs.
Re:Not just a desktop computer (Score:3, Funny)
Re:I've seen OS/2 on ATM screens many times (Score:3, Insightful)
If those machines were locked down embedded Windows or something similar, then I wouldn't be so worried. But these things appear to be more like a normal Windows installation with an ATM program on top. That *is* scary.
Think of it, if so much care was taken on the design of the ATM, how do you know that your credit card number and PIN aren't in a text file that can be read directly if you manage to get to the Windows interface?
And what will h
Re:Slashdotted... Google Cache URL (Score:5, Informative)
Mignight Spaghetti [216.239.39.104]
Re:Some thoughts (Score:4, Informative)
http://www.computerworld.com/securitytopics/sec
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/55/34175.h
Re:Mirror? (Score:4, Funny)